In the Catholic world, one can leave one's home and wander in various fields, but the tents of the Church are large, its compassio...n great, forgiveness easy. The loss of home in Protestant living is more difficult, yet not shattering, for each man is still a part of the entire community who are bound by an impersonal ethic of love. But in Jewish life, each home is an island unto itself, and the severing of the ties of family and tradition causes a tremor which can never be settled. The position of the Jews through the centuries, a stranger in every land, no voice, no ban their own, deepens this traumatic condition. For not only have they no home as their own as a people, but within each alien culture the strange gods tear away the sons and there is no home in the family.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift... I have ever been given. For what person, except one's own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying ...some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house--in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room... he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I had been sitting in my mother's house in a small town in Rhode Island watching the Miss America Pageant, as we always did. After... the telecast, I went into the kitchen with my bathrobe tied around by neck singing, "Therrrre She Is, Miss A-mer-i-caaa!" And that very next year I was there on that stage, with God knows how many people watching, and millions of seventeen-year-old women sitting in their living rooms watching the Miss America Pageant. Well, I was so emotionally touched by the whole moment that I was hysterical crying! That I was there, and that there were millions of people watching me, dreaming about doing it someday.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched upla...nds; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festal board,--may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Weak as we are, compared to the health strength we are conscious would be desirable; ignorant as we are, compared to the height, a...nd breadth, and depth of knowledge which extends around us as far as the universal range of matter itself; miserable as we are, compared to the happiness of which we feel ourselves capable; yet in this living principle we see nothing beyond or above us, nothing to which we or our descendants may not attain, of great, of beautiful, of excellent. But to feel the power of this mighty principle, to urge it forward in its course and accelerate the change in our condition which it promises, we must awaken to its observation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »